The Long Count Read Online Free PDF Page A

door. A man was sitting at the desk. Hunched a little to one side, his head was angled; both hands thrown out before him, one of them fisted and the other one holding a gun.

Five
    He did not move. He did not speak. The rank odor lifted directly from where he sat. Moving closer Quarrie could see how his eyes had sunk in their sockets, his stare as sightless as the skull they had found in the river. He looked about fifty; hair clipped so close it appeared to graze his scalp. Jaw slack, a trail of dried blood had leaked from his temple where the hole was small and round. The automatic cupped in his palm looked like a twenty-two and with no exit wound visible, the slug had to be lodged in his brain. Looking closer still, Quarrie could see purple colored marks like bruises on the skin just above his collarbone.
    Apart from the dead man there was nothing wrong with the room, no sign of a fight or struggle or anybody else having been there. Nothing looked out of place. Quarrie could see no obvious marks on the floorboards. A blotter was placed centrally on the desk with a gold pen set just ahead of it. A wire file holder perched to the right of the dead man’s hand, an empty in-tray of sorts.
    Studying the bullet hole more closely, he could see where pinpricks of black powder scattered the skin. The dead man’s gaze was fixed; he seemed to peer almost, as if he could not quite get a handle on something in the corner of the room.
    The sound of footsteps in the passage broke the silence, heavy and weighted; a shadow filled the doorway. As Quarrie turned he had a pistol drawn.
    ‘Jesus, whoa! Hold up there – I’m a cop.’ A sheriff’s deputy not wearing his hat. He stood with his eyes wide and palms outstretched.
    Shaking his head, Quarrie let the hammer down. ‘Don’t be doingthat,’ he said as he holstered the pistol. ‘Creeping up on a feller, it’s not a very smart thing to do.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ the young man said. ‘I should’ve hollered from upstairs. My name’s Collins, Fannin County sheriff’s department.’ He stared at Quarrie’s gun. ‘You know what, I never even saw that piece till it was pointed at me. Have you always been that fast?’ He was young and skinny, and when he stepped into the light he looked pretty raw. Spotting the dead man in the chair he lifted a hand to his mouth as if he was going to throw up.
    ‘Jesus H,’ he uttered. ‘Thought I could smell something. How long’s he been like that?’
    ‘I figure maybe two or three days.’
    ‘All that time with the fire going up there in the living room. No wonder this place stinks.’ The deputy crossed the room now holding the cuff of his shirt to his nose. At the desk he bent with his free hand pressed to his thigh.
    ‘Shot hisself. Never could figure why anybody would want to do that. You come across many suicides before?’
    Quarrie did not answer. He moved from the desk to the shelves where he considered the photographs more carefully and could see they were all of the dead man in uniform and clearly taken some years ago.
    He studied the gun case, which housed an assortment of rifles as well as handguns and a razor sharp-looking bayonet. They were secured on hooks and one of those hooks was empty. Stepping to the side Quarrie ran his eye down the crack between the edge of the cabinet and the door and saw that though it was closed, the door wasn’t locked.
    ‘You figure that?’ From behind him the deputy was still talking. ‘How anybody would want to take a gun to their head? Hell of a thing. Got to be a reason I suppose.’
    ‘You’d think so,’ Quarrie said. ‘Sickness, loneliness maybe, all kinds of stuff a man might be going through that he ain’t goingto talk about to anybody else about.’ He looked back at the desk. ‘That’s how it is sometimes, only this guy didn’t kill himself.’
    ‘Do what now?’ the deputy said.
    ‘Someone was here and they put that bullet in him,’ Quarrie stated. ‘Afterwards they